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Research Article
‘What the hell do you want to do in Puerto Rico? What would Pissarro do in St Thomas?’: Francisco Oller and the art of painting the Caribbean
Maria Cristina Fumagalli*†
mcfuma@essex.ac.uk
mcfuma@btopenworld.com
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert‡
liparavisini@vassar.edu
Abstract
In 1858, the Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833–1917) arrived in Paris, where he befriended Camille Pissarro (born in St Thomas, Danish Antilles), and other ‘modern’ painters. Unlike Pissarro, who never returned to his native island, Oller spent his life living/painting, between Europe, mostly France and Spain, and Puerto Rico, seeking to understand and define Puerto Rican identity or puertorriqueñidad through his work. The disbelief with which his departure from Paris in 1865 was met by his artist friends (‘What the hell do you want to do in Puerto Rico?’) foregrounds the principal questions that Oller’s work engaged with: ‘What is the place of art and artists in the 19th-century Caribbean? What is the place of the Caribbean and Caribbean artists in 19th-century art?’ This article locates Oller’s explicitly articulated and implicitly inferred answers in selected works (including still-lifes and El Velorio) produced between the 1850s and 1910s.
Keywords
Francisco Oller y Cesteropuertorriqueñidadstill-lifesCaribbean artEl Velorio In September 1866, French artist Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Guillemet wrote a heartfelt letter to his friend and fellow painter Francisco Oller y Cestero who, seemingly without properly forewarning his French companions, had returned to his native Puerto Rico in the Autumn of 1865.1 Guillemet voices his bitterness at the predicament faced by all artists in Paris at a moment he defines as ‘atrocious’: no available credit, the sky-high cost of paint, no commissions, and severe (and, he believes, misguided) gatekeepers (GO211) guarding the door to the salons. All these problems notwithstanding, Guillemet still urges Oller to return to the excitement of Paris, where new ‘ideas are beautifully circulating’. Remaining in Puerto Rico, Guillemet insists, makes very little sense for an artist (GO211–12) who should be in the very place where the art of painting is being contested, revisited, and profoundly revolutionised. Paul Cézanne, in a letter dated 23 October 1866 and addressed to Jacob Camille Pissarro, appears to share Guillemet’s belief that Oller would become ‘very bored’ on his island. Rather erroneously (see Delgado Mercado 1983: 39), Cézanne adds that ‘with no colours within reach, it must be very difficult to paint’ and hopes that Oller would ‘get work on a merchant ship and come straight to France’ (Cézanne 1866 in Rewald 1944: 78).
Instructively, Guillemet and Cézanne’s reactions to Oller’s unexpected and (to them) inexplicable relocation to his native island give us a sense of how Puerto Rico (and the Caribbean as a whole) was seen as far too peripheral, disabling, isolated, and isolating for a proper ‘modern’ artist, even by young radicals. Guillemet’s and Cézanne’s reservations and preoccupations chime with Walter Benjamin’s evaluation of Paris as the capital of the 19th century and modernity (Benjamin [1935] 1999: 3–13) as they firmly believe that, indisputably, the new art which Guillemet, using Proudhon as his springboard, believes will rise from the ‘ashes’ of the ‘old civilization’, can only be born and developed there. Intriguingly, seeking to persuade Oller to return, Guillemet rhetorically asks: ‘What the hell do you want to do in Puerto Rico? What would Pissarro do in St Thomas?’ (GO211).
For his part, Jacob Camille Pissarro, who, in 1855, had relocated to Paris from the Caribbean, in his case the Danish-held island of St Thomas, had also written a letter to his Puerto Rican friend on 14 December 1865, almost a year before Guillemet.2 Pissarro does not really question his friend’s decision to return home, even if he excludes that others (he mentions specifically Guillemet), will follow him to the New World. Pissarro, instead, suggests to his friend that it would be a good idea, if he can afford to do so, to send works to Paris that would introduce him and their mutual friends to Puerto Rican ‘mores’: ‘we would prefer a study of a mulata’, he specifies, ‘no holy paintings’. Leaving aside Pissarro’s concerns with what he suspected was Oller’s too strict attachment to his island’s Jesuits and possible exoticising/eroticising undertones—the fetishisations of mulatas was to become a factor in representations of the Spanish Caribbean—Pissarro appears to acknowledge that, despite not being metropolitan Paris, Puerto Rico was not only not too remote, but, most importantly, that the island would inspire Oller to produce works which could potentially interest and enrich his Parisian friends, his fellow artists, and others. Almost a year later, in his September 1866 letter to Oller, Guillemet actually refers to a visit with Pissarro to evaluate (and admire) some paintings by Oller that had just arrived in Paris from Puerto Rico: amongst them, he singles out as particularly impressive a portrait of a Black woman.
The two letters from Paris are useful points of departure as they indirectly turn the spotlight on questions that Oller actively engaged with all his life: how does one conjugate one’s commitment to one’s island and its representation in a way that would be intelligible, valuable, and valued both locally and in the metropole? How does one claim the centre stage for something which has been, and continues to be, historically marginalised? What is the place of art and artists in 19th-century Caribbean and, conversely, what is the place of the Caribbean and Caribbean artists in 19th-century art? Or, in brief, to paraphrase Guillemet: what would an artist (want to) do there? Focusing on a selection of canvases and drawings produced in roughly sixty years (from the 1850s to the 1910s), here we locate Oller’s explicitly articulated or implicitly inferred answers.
Oller, it goes without saying, was not the only one interrogating himself along the above-mentioned lines; after all, he was an artist directly or indirectly interconnected with others from the Americas and Europe (for example, Jacob Camille Pissarro, Fritz Melbye, Paul Gauguin, Charles Laval, Frederic Church, Martin Johnson Heade, Marianne North, Horace Wolcott Robbins, Charles DeWolf Brownell, and Winslow Homer) who, painting the Caribbean in the second half of the 19th century, were asking themselves related questions.3 At a turbulent moment in history when new biological theories challenged accepted notions of ‘nature’ and ‘race’, and borders and spheres of colonial power were constantly being redrawn, they operated in a region still reckoning with colonialism and slavery (or their legacy), as well as the contradictions of post-emancipation; a region on the ‘margins’, but also slowly establishing itself as a ‘tourist’ destination. Each in his/her own distinct way, these painters all contributed to ongoing renegotiations of previous understandings of the Caribbean, its people, and its culture by constantly reflecting, questioning, challenging, and/or problematically promoting views of the Caribbean as idealised virginal landscapes or troubled site of contestations, land of ‘exotic’ (or ‘exoticised’) peoples, flora and fauna, antidotal ‘elsewhere’, or source of prodigious mineral and agricultural wealth, ‘vacationscapes’, or—in particular for Oller—intimately known locale in search of political and aesthetic emancipatory redefinition.
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1833, Oller first travelled to Paris in 1858, keen to absorb what the metropolis had to offer. By then he had already had a taste of Europe—he had spent two years in Madrid (1851–3)—and produced a number of notable paintings. Among them is a copy of the portrait of his grandfather painted by José Campeche y Jordán, an 18th-century mixed-race artist widely respected and admired in Puerto Rico. Oller’s 1847 copy of Campeche’s Portrait of Dr Francisco Oller might be seen as a precursor of the many portraits of island notables that Oller was to paint during his long career, frequently to support himself, his family, or his projects.4 A proper discussion of Oller’s portraiture is beyond our scope, but it is worth pointing out that, overall, it provides us with a gallery of local and/or locally relevant personalities which attests to Oller’s (visual) engagement with the cultural life, patronage, and politics of a dramatically changing Puerto Rico, as the transformation from Spanish colony—for example, portraits of Queen Isabel II (1854 or 1858) and of the constitutional monarch Amedeo I of Spain (1871)—to territory ruled by the United States—for example, portraits of President William McKinley (1898), or George Washington, (1902)—only too clearly exemplifies.
Unlike Pissarro, who never returned to the Americas after moving to Paris in 1855, Oller spent his entire life travelling, living, and, of course, painting, between Europe, mostly France and Spain—where he became Painter to the Royal Chamber in 1872—and Puerto Rico. Despite his role as Painter to the Royal Chamber or his portraits of Spanish sovereigns or Governor-Generals of the island, Oller’s views on Puerto Rico’s colonial subjugation and right to self-determination are evident from his very early work: Capeadora a caballo or Lady Bullfighter on a Horse (1851–2),5 for instance, is considered as a portrait of the island herself, represented as a capeadora, confronting, and ultimately dodging, the attack of a bull which, in this political allegory, stands for Spain (Delgado Mercado 1983: 11–12; Sullivan 2014: 48–9).
Given Oller’s ingrained and long-lasting nationalist impetus, it is no surprise that, whilst in Paris in the 1850s and 1860s, he should have shared with his fellow colonial Pissarro an interest in the radical ideas fiercely discussed in cafés and brasseries. The two Caribbean painters became part of a group of like-minded young and rebellious artists (amongst others, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Guillemet, and Cézanne). Excited about experimental en plein air painting, Pissarro and Oller had a profound admiration for Gustave Courbet’s and Jean-François Millet’s realist depictions of lower-class life and rural hard work; most importantly, they both desired to explore further how to express a particular locale—or terroir—with all its specificity and intensity (Sullivan 2014: 53). They also shared disappointments, hardship, and successes, such as rejections from, or acceptances at, the much-coveted Paris Salons—Pissarro’s first inclusion took place in 1859, Oller’s in 1864. Oller, however, was simultaneously living in two different circles of friends, pulling him in different directions: while his artistic entourage wanted Oller to gravitate towards the French capital in order to participate in and shape the aesthetic (and political) debates sizzling in the French capital, the patriotic group revolving round the Puerto Rican pro-independence intellectual and activist Ramón Emeterio Betances, a friend who also lived in the French capital at the time, constantly reminded Oller of his native island, its struggle, and the need to actively contribute to it.
Pissarro’s encouragement to paint ‘the mores’ of Puerto Rico, therefore, offered a way to bring these two worlds together: his advice might not have dramatically changed Oller’s career path—he was committed to Puerto Rico from the very start—but it might have reinforced Oller’s determination to represent his island not only within, but also without its perimeter, helping him to crystallise his vision and mission. Oller, in fact, was keen to follow Pissarro’s advice and document the Puerto Rican experience for European viewers until very late in his career: in 1895, when he returned to Paris for the last time, it was to present to that year’s Salon his monumental painting El Velorio (The Wake) (c.1893) (Figure 1). At that point, Pissarro and Oller were painting very differently, and, in March 1895, Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien that he did not like El Velorio—he regarded it ‘a bit obvious’ (Pissarro 1895 in Rewald 1943: 264). The painting, however, is now considered foundational for Puerto Rican art and for regional representation and self-representation, definition, and self-definition. Artistic engagement and revisitation by contemporary Puerto Rican artists have further secured its fundamental role.6
Figure 1.
Francisco Oller, El Velorio (The Wake), c. 1893. Oil on canvas, (2.4 × 4 m). Museo de Historia y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.
The wake of a child whose corpse is laid on top of a table covered in flowers. It is set in an overcrowded hut where over twenty figures of different age, gender, class, status, and race share the stage with two dogs, a cat, a dead pig, corn cobs, and a bunch of plantains hanging from the ceiling, as well as lit or extinguished candles and some scattered playing cards.
Originally entitled El Velorio de angelito, the canvas reproduces the wake of a child or baquiné, a local ceremony of syncretic origins, a combination of African and Spanish rituals revisited and adapted by the rural population of the island: part mourning ritual, part celebration of the transition of a child, too innocent to have sinned, into an angel, it gathered the community for a traditional ritual wake involving games, songs, prayers, food, and alcohol before a morning burial (Bantulà Janot & Payà Rico 2014: 167–88). The wake is set in an overcrowded bohío or hut where over twenty figures of different age, gender, class, status, and race—many of whom are jíbaros or subsistence farmers from the island’s mountainous region—share the stage with two dogs, a cat, a roasted pig, and a variety of (mostly symbolic) props, from a bunch of plantains to various lit or extinguished candles. The site of the painting is the liminal (and culturally hybrid) space that captures the social and racial fluidity of the Puerto Rican countryside twenty years after emancipation. Over the years, this complex image has been praised, criticised, scrutinised, even over-scrutinised, by a number of critics, from José de Zequeira (1894) to Ramón Soto-Crespo (2009), from Osiris Delgado Mercado (1983) to Haydée Venegas (1979; 1983; 1985), from Félix Matos Bernier (1907) to Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011), and from Alejandro Infiesta (1895) to Albert Boime (1983; 1985) and Edward Sullivan (2014), to name just a few. Interestingly, according to Sebastián González García’s 1967 evaluation, the criticism attracted by El Velorio at home and abroad was motivated by different forms of ignorance and prejudice: ‘Due to ignorance of art principles and social prejudice in San Juan. Due to ignorance of Puerto Rican society and artistic prejudice in Paris’ (González García 1967: 20; translation ours).
Clearly, Oller seems to have been concerned about Parisian ignorance of Puerto Rican society as he pre-emptively tried to counteract it by producing an explicatory pamphlet which would accompany the exhibition of El Velorio to the Paris Salon while, at the same time, pandering to French anti-clericalism and equalitarian beliefs. The text is worth quoting in its entirety:
Astonishing criticism of a custom that still exists in Puerto Rico among country people and which has been propagated by the priests. On this day the family and friends have kept vigil all night over the dead child, who is placed on a table with flowers and lace. The mother is holding back her grief, on her head she wears a white turban; she does not weep for fear her tears might wet the wings of her little angel on his flight to heaven. She laughs and offers a drink to the priest, who eagerly eyes the roasted pig whose entry is awaited with enthusiasm. Inside this indigenous hut, children play, dogs romp, lovers embrace, and musicians get drunk. This an orgy of brutish appetites under the guise of a gross superstition.
(Oller 1895 in Benítez & Venegas 1983: 193; translation ours).
According to Mirzoeff, this text—with its implied condemnation of the practice as a depraved ‘orgy of brutish appetites’—was not produced by the artist, although he offers no evidence for this; he is more persuasive when he points to other less condemnatory readings, such as the possibility that the lover’s embrace, rather than being a lascivious one, might have been motivated by their joint mourning (Mirzoeff 2011: 190). This exegetic effort—whether authored or approved by Oller—would reveal to us an artist determined to ensure that his Parisian audience understand its indictment of the Catholic Church (‘the priests’) which he (explicitly) condemns as responsible, together with (implicitly) the colonial elite, for the ‘gross superstition’ afflicting the poor and undereducated of the island and for the fact that they are allowed to continue to indulge in ‘org[ies] of brutish appetites’. The figure of the priest is described in this text in a particular damning light, surrounded as he is by the cards in disarray on the floor in the left corner, and the singing, dancing, eating, and drinking in which the participants in the wake indulge. Oller was certainly alert to the fact that the ‘urban cast’ (to which he belonged by birth) often regarded with suspicion, condescension, or even disparagement what was happening in ‘the island’—that is, beyond the city walls (González 1983: 75, 78). Clearly, he was aware that his life was not the life of the campesinos (peasants) or jíbaros, or of the formerly enslaved subsistence farmers represented in El Velorio, but it is worth remembering that Oller painted El Velorio whilst living in the countryside (albeit in an estate owned by his friend Manuel Elzaburu y Vizcarrondo), that he had been (perhaps frequently) inside the bohío of a jíbaro he befriended while strolling in the countryside, and that he attended, at least once, an actual baquiné (Boehm-Oller 1967: 27, Sullivan 2014: 77).
The precision and details with which Oller depicts the interior of the bohío and everyday tools and objects (machete, hanging coconut cups, baskets), popular marks of devotion (cross with a little branch from Palm Sunday), and local produce (plantains, corn cobs, and, ostensibly, pitorro—a local moonshine liquor derived from sugar cane), have been noted or even praised by some critics (Venegas 1979: 18, de Zequeira 1894 quoted in Delgado Mercado 1983: 95–6). Other commentators, instead, found the characterisation of El Velorio totally unrealistic: they question, for example, that the Puerto Rican clergy would have taken part in such rituals without protesting, and insist that the appearance of the piglet occurs at the wrong time of the ceremony (Infiesta 1895: 98), or contest, in particular, Oller’s representation of the mother: ‘no Puerto Rican mother gets inebriated, nor has she ever, in front of her son’s corpse’ (Bernier 1907: 98).
It is possible to read these views as expressions of discomfort or denial vis-à-vis Oller’s depiction, particularly if one considers that posited discrepancies between reality and representation have been described as strategic signposting. Noting the pole that comes out at the back of the piglet’s skull instead of its mouth, some critics have maintained that the animal mirrors the crucified Christ: Soto-Crespo, for instance, refers to this image as ‘porcine crucifixion’ (Soto-Crespo 2009: 27), while Venegas goes as far as arguing, repeatedly, that the dead pig signposts a diabolical, upside-down cult (which nonetheless relies for its effect on a precise knowledge of the details one is set to invert) (Venegas 1979: 18; 1983: 142), even the way in which the bunch of plantains hangs from the ceiling has been read as a deliberate sign of the reversal of values which the painting laments(Delgado Mercado 1983: 96–7).7
Oller’s painstaking accuracy (or its tactical subversion), we would contend, contributes to create a local intensity which sustains a vision of the status quo harbouring more complexity than a simple denunciation of political or clerical culpability, the mark of his debt to Couture or Courbet (Boime 1983: 50–2), a ‘tribute to th[e] rural world’ (González 1983: 79), or, conversely, the ‘depiction of an orgiastic mass dedicated to the devil’ (Venegas 1983: 142), and a derisory attack on rural and Africa-based customs by a white and privileged middle-class liberal Puerto Rican (Boime 1985: 66–7). Key to our argument is the fact that, while the critique provided by El Velorio on the clergy and colonial elite, explicated by the artist himself, has been often remarked upon by the painting’s critics, Oller’s compassion for the misguided mourning mother has not always been fully appreciated.
Oller’s depiction and pamphlet, we contend, offer a rather nuanced view of the presence, absence, and/or (lack of) manifestation of the mother’s love and grief. Captured by the artist as she ‘is holding back her grief’, in fact, the mother smiles, awkwardly, because, Oller informs us, she has been persuaded not to cry to ensure that her dead child can fly to heaven with dry wings. A long series of commentators have dismissed the mother as halfway between stupid and callous, an unrepresentative and morally reprehensible drunkard, or a vain creature exclusively interested in being a ‘good’ host: for example, noting that her gaze is directed at us, Delgado has postulated that she is inviting viewers to join the party with a glass in her hand (Delgado Mercado 1983: 93). Given the circumstances, however, it seems blatantly prejudicial to rule out that the mother might not be forcing herself to smile, resorting to inebriation in desperation to cope with her loss, and gazing on viewers to plead with them not to forget her grief (and her child) amidst all the noise and confusion. It is useful to remember, in this respect, that Oller was inspired to paint this scene by an invitation to a baquiné in the countryside where he noticed that, while everyone else was singing, drinking, or eating, the mother of the dead child in question was the only attendee who was actually crying.8
In El Velorio, Oller highlights the mother’s suffering by endowing her with a ‘white turban’ or bandana around her head—the colour of spiritual rebirth in African-derived religious practices9—which seems to signpost the existence of a (spiritual and psychological) wound. Crucially, moreover, it is not clear if the mother is actually inviting us to join in the merrymaking or simply to bear witness to it: her gesture, in fact, might be a merely demonstrative one, merely pointing us (like the painter) to what ‘is there’. This reading gains traction if we consider that the mother is positioned on the side of the painting, away from the heart of the celebration, and flanked by two male figures of whom one could be the father or grandfather of the dead child (Infiesta 1895: 96, Delgado Mercado 1983: 93) and who are more impassive onlookers than participants in the revelry. The figure of the mother, moreover, acquires further poignancy if one considers it as a response, some thirty years later, to Pissarro’s request for a study of a ‘mulata’ given that, instead of the customary eroticised and exoticised figure, Oller depicts a Puerto Rican mother attending the wake of her dead child.
The mother’s white bandana, signposting her pain, chimes, intriguingly, with the white headscarf of the other character Oller mentions in his pamphlet, namely the Black man at the centre of the image and the feast in which, however, he does not participate, and who is, significantly, the only figure, in the final version, who focuses on the dead child. These two figures (mother and Black man) seem more connected than has been so far highlighted: in what we could call a ‘visual chiasm’, in the final version, the mother, who does not gaze upon her child, becomes the character who invites us to ‘look’, a role which, in a preparatory study for El Velorio (c. 1892–3), was reserved for the Black man. It is likely that the old Black man represented by Oller was intended as a former enslaved subject, since slavery had only been abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, twenty years before the completion of El Velorio: his earring and headscarf have been identified as markers of this status (Boime 1985: 67). As in the rest of the Caribbean region, albeit with some variations, emancipation was not ‘straightforward’: in Puerto Rico, it came with the proviso that freed subjects had to work for their previous owners as salaried labourers for a minimum of three years to facilitate the economic transition (Dietz 1986: 35).
The introduction of this impoverished and exhausted Black character suggests that Oller was not only aware of, but quick to remonstrate against, the continued condemnation of freed Black Puerto Ricans to servitude, illiteracy, and poverty. Oller’s representation of the Black figure has been praised as the antithesis of the traditional ‘idiot and abject’ Black person (de Zequeira 1894 quoted in Delgado Mercado 1983: 91). Repeatedly credited as the moral authority of the painting, the gravitas of his demeanour has been read in a variety of ways: as a metaphor for the artist’s mourning for the post-emancipation demise of a possible ‘mulatto state’ (Soto-Crespo 2009: 28), as the figure’s (and Oller’s) (visual) lamentation for the death of a ‘cross-racial society for Puerto Rico’ and of ‘a future in which society was not divided by race’ (Mirzoeff 2011: 193), or even as an indication that the Black man understands that, ultimately, death is the only form of freedom available to him (de Zequeira 1894 quoted in Delgado Mercado 1983: 92).
These interpretations clearly rely on the understanding that the dead child is meant to signify the (defunct) Puerto Rican cross-racial ‘young political state’ and the hope it could harbour (Soto-Crespo 2009: 28, Mirzoeff 2011: 193): in this respect, Boime’s criticism of Oller’s use of the Black man ‘as a symbol rather than a person’ might not be entirely without merit, but it certainly becomes less incisive given that allegorical/symbolic readings are applied to Oller’s characters (and/or were allegedly conceived as part of the representation) regardless of their race (Boime 1985: 67). The defeatism and pessimism which imbue this reading, however, can be counteracted by the fact that there is a ray of (Puerto Rican) sunlight penetrating into the hut and engulfing the little corpse. One could argue that this light, irrupting, crucially, in the here and now of the scene, might turn the transcendent child (reborn as an angel) into a possible emblem of (national) hope rather than of death and despair; it might even allow us to rethink the idea that the painting is dishearteningly acknowledging that death is the only possible hope of (an always deferred) freedom available to the Black population (Boime 1985: 67).
The many complexities of El Velorio further reverberate with the fact that the painting is a compendium of different genres (portrait, genre, landscapes, or still lifes), all shaped by Oller’s commitment to be instrumental in the forging of a Puerto Rican vision and identity which he was keen both to disseminate locally and ‘export’. If the monumental El Velorio clearly fulfils Oller’s ambition to produce an (‘exportable’) monumental painting à la Courbet focused on his island and its ‘mores’ (Delgado Mercado 1983: 80), we agree with Boime when he singles out one of Oller’s still lifes, namely Plátanos verdes or Green Plantains (c. 1892–3), as a primary exemplification of Oller’s ‘participation in Puerto Rico’s search for cultural and national identity’ (Boime 1983: 37).
Green Plantains, and his companion piece Plátanos amarillos or Ripe Plantains (c. 1892–3), have now become iconic representations of puertorriqueñidad with which, as in the case of El Velorio, contemporary artists continue to engage in different ways.10 In both these canvases, the plantains appear (vertically or horizontally) on a blank background: if, according to Boime, those in Plátanos verdes are presented to us as ‘a holy icon on an altar’ (Boime 1983: 37), they are also positioned on a simple table, that is where they would be during everyday domestic practices; similarly, the ripe plantains in Plátanos amarillos hanging from (presumably) a ceiling illustrate and credit a well-established daily practice. Other still lifes (or bodegones), produced over a period of almost forty years, not all of which have received sufficient attention, foreground not only the (iconic) produce on display but, more explicitly, what Michel de Certeau might have called a ‘practice of every day life’ which does not presuppose a ‘return to individuality’ (de Certeau 1984: xi); as such, they can be seen as a favoured vehicle through which Oller continued to document the Puerto Rican collective experience not only for Europeans but, crucially, also for local viewers.
In 1868, not long after receiving Pissarro’s and Guillemet’s letters, Oller exhibited at the Exposición de la Sociedad Económica in San Juan forty-five paintings and drawings, including eight bodegones. Sadly, these works are now lost, but the detailed commentaries of Puerto Rican critic Federico Asenjo y Arteaga11 enable us to appreciate how they reflect Oller’s commitment to (paint) his native island: for instance, while the allegorical La Venus de Borinquen (The Venus of Borinquen/Puerto Rico) (no. 13) openly celebrates Puerto Rico’s pre-Columbian and pre-colonial roots, even his renditions of Santa Cecilia (nos 3 and 11), we are told, are modelled on Oller’s Puerto Rican fiancée Isabel Tinagero de la Escalera (AA216). Oller’s multifaceted focus on his locale can also be seen as an attempt at re-legitimising the region and re-evaluating the role that the ‘peripheral’ Caribbean was expected to play in relation to Europe and in the development of modern art. While he included no canvases portraying Paris, four vistas of Copenhagen (nos 20–23), which he visited during his first trip to France (1858–65) (nos 20–23), are more than counterbalanced by fourteen local landscapes (nos 32–45). Moreover, two paintings (nos 18 and 19) set in the strategically located municipality of Río Piedras, a centre for sugar production, cattle raising, and transportation—then a separate town from San Juan—and focused on its Casa de la Convalecencia bathed in tropical light (AA216–18), seem to constitute an alternative (sub)urban scene by an ‘off-centre’ ‘painter of (Caribbean) modern life’.
Overall, Oller’s visual investigations of puertorriqueñidad for the 1868 Exposición are much better understood if we consider that, in the years between 1865 and 1873, while Oller was back on native soil, Puerto Rico suffered acutely from the reverberations of Spain’s political instability: repression and censorship on the island were rife, slavery had not been abolished yet, and conditions were difficult, not only in terms of social justice but also economically. In 1865, a royal decree had authorised the minister of ultramarine affairs to draw up a document to be used as basis to create special laws for the government of the island but, predictably, all proposals for abolition and autonomy were voted down (Van Middledyk 1903: 167–9). As a result, Oller’s old friend Betances resolved that the only way forward was an armed rebellion, and planned his return to this native island from his exile to lead the rebels. His plans were discovered and thwarted by the Spanish government, but some of his allies on the island hastened nonetheless to proclaim the Republic of Puerto Rico on 23 September 1868, offering freedom to the enslaved population who supported the rebels. Known as the Grito de Lares (Cry of Lares), the insurrection was easily quashed by the colonial army (Dietz 1986: 71–3).
Oller’s works for the Exposición de la Sociedad Económica, which took place in San Juan in June 1868, just a few months before the revolt, reflect this troubled time. While Oller’s likeness of Queen Isabel II (no. 1) is but a copy of a canvas by the Spanish artist Frederico de Madrazo, the majority of the portraits included in the exhibition immortalise personalities well-known in Puerto Rico, like Manuel Sicardó y Osuna, a teacher, the elderly Augusto de Cottes, or Oller himself as a young bohemian (nos 4, 6, 10). Remarkably, when Asenjo y Arteaga fails to positively identify Oller’s sitters or subjects, he still ‘recognises’ them as local types or, as he puts it on one occasion (no. 7), ‘hijas de los tropicos’ (‘daughters of the tropics’) (AA214–15). Oller’s portrait of a Negrito alegre (‘Happy Black boy’ no. 15) has been seen as an antecedent of the Black figure playing a güiro in El Velorio (Delgado Mercado 1983: 44) but before jumping to the conclusion that Oller might be uncritically echoing the stereotype of the ‘happy slave’, often redeployed to justify and perpetuate slavery, it is worth remembering that Negrito alegre is contemporaneous with Un boca abajo or The Flogged Negro (1868), which is shaped by the opposite purpose: to denounce the cruelty of the plantation economy.
Un boca abajo reveals, to paraphrase Voltaire, the price at which one ate sugar not only in Europe but also in the Caribbean. The actual painting, Un boca abajo, is lost, but a photograph in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris reveals to us a scene set in a local plantation. In the foreground, a Black overseer is about to flog an enslaved male who is tied, face down, on a ladder-like device. The disciplining performative/‘spectacular’ aspect of the punishment has been noted and is particularly evident in the fact that other enslaved subjects are gathered in the background to observe (and learn from) the scene; the white owner conspicuously sipping his (sugared?) coffee ignores the Black female who, on her knees, is pleading with him to spare the man about to be whipped; another white figure (presumably the local bailiff) averts his gaze from the spectacle, perhaps uncomfortable, but nonetheless complicit, with the violence (Boime 1985: 40, Manthorne 2001: 346–8).
One of Oller’s initial sketches for Un boca abajo zooms on the overseer about to strike and a Black subject who, prone on the ground, is lifting an arm as if to protect himself from the imminent lash of the whip—unlike his counterpart in the painting, he does not have both hands tied (Un boca abajo I).12 The other includes a crowd of figures, as in the final painted version, but differently distributed in space, seemingly without the insouciant owner (Un boca abajo II). In both cases, the resonance between the boca abajo practice and the via crucis, crucifixion, and/or deposition of Christ appears even more evident than in the painting itself, heightening the pathos of the images. Another sketch, Una madre esclava or La recompensa de la nodriza (The Slave Mother or The Recompense of the Wet Nurse) (1866–7), presents us with a wet nurse surrounded by children and about to be whipped by one of her former charges. In this respect, perhaps the fact that the pleading woman in Un boca abajo has one of her breasts exposed might allude to the fact that, in a futile attempt to move him to compassion, she is reminding the owner of the relation which used to connect them when he was an infant.
Oller ensured that some of these paintings travelled to France, where they signposted that, although slavery was still practised in Puerto Rico, emancipatory voices of resistance and protest in the island were also loud and clear. Un boca abajo was not included in the 1869 edition because it was considered offensive to Spain; it was, however, accepted at the Salon des refusés when Oller took it again to Paris in 1875, after the 1873 abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico. Oller declared that the painting was then stolen from him, but it appears that it found its way into the collection of Julien (Père) Tanguy who had acquired it as guarantee for debts contracted by Oller (Delgado Mercado 1983: 48–9). In a letter to his son Lucien dated 23 March 1895, Pissarro appears to confirm having seen the painting at Tanguy’s and uses it as another example of Oller’s deployment of ‘anecdotal motifs’ which, he believed, ‘shrunk’ and undermined his friend’s work (Pissarro 1895 in Rewald 1943: 263–4). More to Pissarro’s liking, probably, would have been the (non-anecdotal) pencil drawings or ‘estudio[s] del natural’ (as Oller himself characterises them) Lavandera and Lavandera II (Washerwoman and Washerwoman II) which represent the same Black washerwoman, a vital figure in the informal economy of 19th-century Puerto Rico, seemingly busy by a river, wearing a traditional headdress.13 In Lavandera, the woman is seen from the side as she is doing the washing, while in Lavandera II she is immortalised from two different perspectives: on the right, she is seen squatting from behind and, on the left, as in Lavandera, from the side.
In all versions, the woman’s skin colour is carefully rendered—the dark legs, arms, and face, quite densely hatched, create a dynamic contrast with the whiteness of the dress and the washing, enhanced by skilful outlining and minimal shading; her posture, back-breaking, but, at the same time, assertively ‘owned’ by the washerwoman, especially when captured from behind, discourages any sexualised readings when she is lifting her skirt and exposing one of her legs. Fully absorbed in her task, she does not engage with the painter (who must have been reasonably close to capture her likeness) and concedes nothing to him—one could go as far as saying that the image seems to almost register an element of defiance in her presenting her back to the artist. Undated but considered to have been produced in Puerto Rico either between 1866 and 1872 or in 1887–8,14 that is during slavery or after emancipation, Lavandera and Lavandera II look like homages to Black resilience. If the earlier dating is correct, they could be seen as paying a tribute to Black resistance and its contribution to the gradual erosion of the slave system15 as well as providing an alternative to Oller’s Un boca abajo which, aimed at pinpointing the horrors of slavery, represented Black people more as victims than as agents. If the 1887–8 dating for the drawing is correct, instead, it is clear that Oller is also excoriating the hypocrisy and pitfalls of his society by showing how hard work is still part of Black lives after emancipation.
The eight bodegones included in the 1868 exhibition (nos 24–31) and described by Asenjo y Arteaga (AA216–7) reveal instead a local reality with distinctive vegetation, produce, customs, and traditions, which Oller clearly considered fully deserving of fair and honest representation: his mangos, beans, oranges, tomatoes, maize cobs, guanábanas or soursops, cheese, eggs, plantains, and hens were all highly praised by Asenjo y Arteaga for being ‘de una grand verdad’ or ‘very true’ (AA216). The Puerto Rican commentator refers, for example, to no. 28, where a plantain leaf on which some cheese is situated looks so authentic that ‘all the cooks in this country’ (AA217; emphasis added) would reach out to try to use it, highlighting how directly these self-representations could speak to local viewers, triggering important processes of (self-)recognition and, possibly, even (self-)celebration.
It is possible that, during his multiple stays in the capital and given his friendship with Cézanne, whom he had met in 1861 at the Suisse Academy, Oller might have absorbed the Impressionists’ interest in still lifes as a genre suited for innovative pictorial experimentation. Like those of the Impressionists, for example, Oller’s still lifes shed the allegorical and mythological content that had traditionally been central to the genre, favouring instead a focus on form, colour, and luminosity. Oller, however, does not seem to share Cézanne’s focus on the reorientation of the familiar elements of the genre away from their mimetic or symbolic purpose and towards abstracting those elements to reveal their underlying forms, lines, colours, and relationships; equally, he does not pursue a colourist’s approach à la Gauguin who famously argued that ‘colors have their own meaning’ (Ebert-Schifferer 1998: 318). Oller’s works, in fact, display a number of fresh elements that point to new directions and a different assessment of the possibilities of the genre.
Cézanne, in his still lifes, was not necessarily interested in his assemblages of fruit—oranges, apples, and pears, most particularly—being true to nature, eschewing, for example, the fidelity to scale that is the norm in the genre. Oller, who was determined to use the genre to create visual narratives of the foodstuffs and local produce that had defined the nation since the Caribbean region was first inhabited by humans some 6,000 years ago, relied instead on the techniques of realism to vividly depict common and mundane food staples, viewed as exotic elsewhere but embedded in the very centre of Puerto Rican culture and history. Given his political and localising agenda, it is no surprise that Oller was interested in still lifes as vehicles for revealing the close association between food production, culinary practices, history, and national identity.
Oller’s recognition of the still life as a genre that could help pave the path to national identity has been attributed to his familiarity with the work of Luis Egidio Meléndez (1716–80) who had painted a series of forty-four still lifes for the future King Carlos IV, providing ‘an encyclopaedic picture of the country’s bounty’ (Sullivan 2014: 146). Although there is no evidence of Oller’s conceiving a project of a scale comparable to Meléndez’s royal commission, a comparison of Meléndez’s work to that of Oller’s reveals many points of contact between the two artists: for example, Meléndez was interested in depicting the foods central to the diets of the urban population of 18th-century Madrid, the links they provided between rural and urban enclaves, and the production of a rich variety of fruit-based drinks, like lemonade, chocolate, or horchata; he was also particularly interested in the depiction of cooking utensils of traditional manufacture, containers and cooking pots, basins, bottles, and jugs. Meléndez’s influence, however, while pointing Oller to a purpose that drives him away from his contemporaries, does not fully account for his move towards a nuanced and methodical exploration of how the depiction of local produce, cooking and kitchen utensils, and the processes through which food is prepared for consumption, speak to viewers of continuities in Puerto Rican history and culture.
Alongside well-known local produce/ingredients, Oller’s paintings (like Meléndez’s), tend to carefully include selected utensils which encapsulate and celebrate a specific way of life. Capturing what has been described as the close relation between food traditions and ‘the science and technologies of everyday material culture, … the rituals and necessities of ordinary life, … forms of taste’ (Capatti & Montanari 2003: xiv), Oller’s still lifes put this complex relation in open dialogue with socio-political and historical contexts whilst enhancing their immediacy. Asenjo y Arteaga’s comments reveal that the works from the 1868 exhibition, for example, presented viewers with, amongst other tools, a copper cauldron stained by verdigris through repeated usage, knives precariously positioned and other utensils yet to be washed because still in the process of being used by an invisible cook, a coffeemaker, clay and glass bottles full of water, and kitchen rags (AA216–17). Gesturing to the process in which they take part, these objects redefine the fixity of the traditional still life, adding a dynamic quality to the work that engages the continuities between labour, production, and consumption. Moreover, the presence and (at times ‘messy’) status of these implements—often caught in (and vividly transmitting the urgency of being in) medias res—reveal that, far from being only visual props, they signpost the intricate reality of the rituals which the production of food on the island could entail—including, of course, strategies of occlusion of human labour. The rituals themselves, notably, were often equally ‘messy’ in more ways than one: for instance, in terms of their (composite) origin, the (mixed) provenance of ingredients, tools, or modalities of preparation, the unpredictable, possibly perilous, contingencies they generated (a utensil clumsily positioned on the edge of a table and about to fall, for instance).
The pride of place Oller reserves for local fruits, vegetables (and food in general) alongside everyday cooking implements, and daily practices which encapsulate exact culinary rituals, is evident in, for example, Bodegón con vino, piña y mangóes (Still Life with Wine, Pineapple and Mangos) (c.1869–70). Salient features of the process through which the edible parts of a fruit are open and readied for consumption are incorporated in the canvas: the pineapple’s cropped crown saved to replant, the remnants of the peeled skin on both the tablecloth and the bare table, the slices of flesh and core, and, above all, the resting fork poised for use, all contribute to capture a fleeting moment of stillness or repose in the ongoing process that takes the fruit from the field to a meal. In one of the canvases in the 1868 exhibition (no. 24), Asenjo y Arteaga observes how a kitchen utensil used to prepare a hen to be cooked still had some traces of grease from the day before (AA216)—was the cook too busy or too tired to clean it?; in another (no. 27), the critic notes how a knife is left in precarious equilibrium during the preparation of soursop juice (AA217)—why was it abandoned like that? will it fall and potentially hurt the (overworked) cook and/or her (it is likely that it would have been a woman) assistants?
In this canvas, Asenjo y Arteaga explains, a split-open soursop, sugar, and water are all lined up and ready to be turned into soursop juice or carato, evoking a time-honoured tradition: the fruit is peeled and sliced to remove the edible white pulp and the inedible black seeds; the pulp will then be mixed with water to make the juice, to which sugar may be added. Asenjo y Arteaga is adamant that the soursop in this canvas is positioned next to a sugar cup so, in this respect, Oller’s work becomes a visual recipe which, by discreetly alluding to slavery and the everyday consumption of sugar, turns itself into a tool which both implicates and interpellates the painter, the white intellectual class to which he belongs, the viewers at the exhibition, and, by extension, all Puerto Ricans who consume sugar in their daily diet in a country which still practises slavery.
Oller returned to the process of preparing the carato in c.1900 with Guanábanas 16 (Still Life with Soursops) (Figure 2), albeit with some differences. In the 1900 version, for example, there are multiple soursops (not a single one as highlighted by the Puerto Rican critic in 1868) and the (presumably) opaque clay bottle mentioned by Arteaga (AA217) has been substituted by the clear ubiquitous pitcher of the traditional European still life. The more refined nature of this water container, however, is offset by the fact that the plate on which the precariously positioned knife was located in the older painting has been eliminated—in the 1900 still life, in fact, it rests directly, but equally precariously, on the edge of the table, adding even more immediacy and urgency to the image. More poignantly, at the back of the later painting, we can see one of the big calabashes or gourds used as receptacles throughout the Caribbean region—since calabashes were not mentioned by Asenjo y Arteaga, we assume that they were absent in the canvas exhibited in 1868. The most notable difference between the two versions, however, is the one which has to do with the presence (or absence) of sugar.
Figure 2.
Francisco Oller, Guanábanas (Still Life with Soursops) (c. 1900). Oil on canvas. Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.
Soursops lying on a table surrounding a half-full clear pitcher and a white enamel bowl full of white produce with a spoon standing in it. In front of the bowl is a sliced open soursop showing its white flesh and black seeds. A knife rests precariously on the edge of the table; behind the pitcher is a big calabash with more soursops.
In 1900, once again, Oller layers for the viewer the process of preparing the carato, but here the spoon is standing in an enamel bowl full of white produce, in this case the dense pulp of the fruit. It is possible that almost twenty years after emancipation—signalled by the decline of the sugar industry as Puerto Rico became a leading producer of coffee—and presumably during the difficult time which preceded the sugar boom triggered by the Foraker Act of 1900, Oller might have been less interested in excoriating slavery or reflecting on the pitfalls of Puerto Rico sugar industry and keener to underscore the creolised dimensions of the process of preparing carato in an attempt to provide a visual counterpart of the complex history of the island, exemplified by the juxtaposition of the (‘European’) pitcher with the local calabash. A very useful and versatile fruit due to the large variation in fruit shapes and sizes, the dried-out shell of the higüero or calabash tree has been transformed into basins of various sizes—cups, bowls, basins, drinking cups—since pre-Columbian times. Placed at the back of the scene as a foundational element, therefore, the calabash in Guanábanas links the painting to the island’s earliest cultural origins, illuminating the start of an everyday process—collection, preparation—that is ultimately historical. As the calabash becomes an element signifying cultural continuity across the centuries, its use as a vessel to gather the soursops from the trees and bring them to the kitchen, obliquely gestures also towards (the race, gender, and ethnicity of) those who have traditionally carried out these activities.
Oller’s interest in pineapples in Bodegón con vino, piña y mangóes (1869–70) also excavates the history of the island by alluding instead to the importance of the pineapple in the history of pictorial representation in the Caribbean. Among the earliest and most iconic images of the Caribbean fruit, in fact, is a drawing in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar océano (1535),17 where he also underscores several attributes of the fruit that are central to Oller’s canvas: the peculiar method of reproduction by the replanting of the fruit’s crown (previously unknown to Europeans), the large-scale cultivation of pineapples among the indigenous populations of the Caribbean, and their large production of local wines from the fermentation of fruit juices, including that of the pineapple (Oviedo [1535] 1851–5: 280–4). Capturing (and transmitting) the elusiveness of taste as a path to deeper cultural and personal knowledge was one of Oviedo’s concerns and a preoccupation Oller seems to share through his nuanced layering of tastes—that of the ripe pineapple, that of the wine distilled from the fruit, and that of the potential mixing of the tastes of pineapples and mangos as fruits or juices.
The overabundance of pineapples in Oller’s 1912–14 Piñas (Pineapples), which could mistakenly remind viewers of depictions of abundance as an ‘embarrassment of riches … where the still life luxuriates in its vexing profusion’ (Berger 2011: 2) can be read instead as a somewhat disordered, spontaneous, and quotidian display of ripe and overripe pineapples just gathered from the garden. The composition avoids the traditional compactness of elements in the centre of the painting in favour of the illusion of seemingly randomly unarranged elements—unpainterly in their realistic capture. There is urgency here in the realistic representation of some of the pineapples as beyond their best, alerting the viewer to the ephemeral quality of produce and the need to process it for consumption before it loses its worth at local market value. And here, once again, Oller articulates the material realities of food production through the depiction of the knife on the plate as a moment of stillness before the task of turning freshly gathered fruit into consumable products begins.
Bodegón con guineos, jarra, y pajuiles (Still Life with Bananas, Jug, and Cashews) (c. 1869–70), painted shortly after the 1868 exhibition and while Oller was still in Puerto Rico, depicts two more salient examples of Puerto Rican and pan-Caribbean produce: the first is one of the most popular banana cultivars in rural Puerto Rico, introduced in the Caribbean in the 16th century through colonial exchanges; the second, the cashew (Anacardium occidentale), is a species widely distributed through the Caribbean and Central America, still known in Puerto Rico by its indigenous Taíno name, pajuil. Sullivan describes the painting as ‘a study in form and texture, with particular emphasis placed upon the depiction of water in the pitcher and glass on the table’ (Sullivan 2014: 150). Yet, if its blue-grey background proves an outstanding backdrop for catching the water diffraction in the pitcher and the detailed rendering of the glass, the focus of the painting is elsewhere, namely on the brightness of the yellows and greens of the fruit on the painting’s foreground. The juxtaposition of two culturally and historically significant fruits signposts Oller’s attention to the hybridity of local food production and consumption and the longue durée of Puerto Rican colonial history.
Importantly, Oller foregrounded the foundational value of Puerto Rico’s local history and culture in the face of different colonising powers. A calabash speaking to the indigenous foundation of Puerto Rican culture is equally prominent in Bodegón con aguacates y utensilios (Still Life with Avocados and Kitchen Utensils) (c. 1890–1) (Figure 3), painted before the US invasion of 1898, and in Higüeras (Gourds) (c. 1912–14), painted after the establishment of US rule in Puerto Rico. In Higüeras, Oller pays homage to the variety, importance, versatility, and history of the calabash fruit by depicting the process of turning the fruit into various bowls and utensils. Here branches of the calabash tree with their leaves display fruit in various sizes; they appear together with the machete needed by the farmer to cut the fruit from the tree and process it into receptacles, and examples of the various implements made from the hard shell of the fruit. Known as ditas in Puerto Rico, they are considered a vital element in the composite cultural heritage (European, Indian, and African) of the island and evidence of the survival of Taíno cultural practices into 21st century Puerto Rico (Haslip-Viera 2008: 232).
Figure 3.
Francisco Oller, Bodegón con aguacates y utensilios (Still Life with Avocados and Kitchen Utensils) (c. 1890–1). Oil on canvas. Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.
Avocados lying on a table surrounding and partly covering a glass bottle and a brown cooking pot with a white ladle placed horizontally on top of it. In front of the pot lies a knife with a white handle placed on a white cloth, an open avocado and a half-opened drawer with protruding cutlery handles; to the side is a small white plate, some red chillies; at the back is a big calabash containing a few more avocados.
Bodegón con aguacates y utensilios (1890–1) also presents us with a calabash and a profusion of avocados, another fruit of significant importance in the indigenous diet of the pan-Caribbean region. In his Natural and General History, Oviedo describes the avocado as one of the foodstuffs that the Spanish colonisers had learned to eat from the indigenous population in a very early example of food-based transculturation (Oviedo [1535] 1851–5; 353–4). The painting’s avocados, the calabash, and the bottle of what could be rum or cooking oil, frame the centrepiece of the canvas, which is the traditional caldero or heavy pot used to make the soup known as sancocho. The sancocho, a rather rustic rural dish made from whatever variety of ingredients are at hand: chicken, smoked ham, beef, pigs’ feet, chickpeas, chorizo, salted cod, corn, various tubers, plantains, and rice dumplings, is the result of what Sidney Mintz has called a bricolage or medley of native ingredients and their culinary uses, blended with Spanish and African imports, but brought together by the African slaves so closely connected to the production, preparation, processing, and circulation of food (Mintz 1996: 59–61). The traditional meal of the rural poor, combining ingredients grown from different groups—Taíno, African, Spanish—it has been slowly integrated into the cultural foundations of the island, to the point of becoming one of the nation’s most emblematic dishes. In the painting, Oller captures the moment of serving the sancocho: two rice dumplings already on the plate, the red pepper to add a level of spiciness to the dish, the ladle poised to draw the soup, and the slices of avocado to be added to the mixture at the very last minute.
Undoubtedly, therefore, Puerto Rico’s culture as well as its history, present, and future constantly preoccupied and inspired Oller who, despite his numerous travels abroad and in the face of different colonial powers, never stopped searching for new ways to contribute to the local collective effort to explore and forge a national consciousness via (self-)representation. However, as his attempt to exhibit El Velorio (created for the 1893 Exposición de Puerto Rico which celebrated the 400th anniversary of the island’s ‘discovery’) at the 1895 Paris Salon only too clearly exemplifies, Oller did not only represent his island and its way of life with all its complexity, contradictions, and richness, but also decided to ‘bring’ them (with ‘warts and all’) right to the heart of the metropole.18 In a way, El Velorio, the still lifes and the other paintings and drawings discussed in this article can all be seen as different (conscious or unconscious) responses to the advice Pissarro imparted to Oller in his 1866 letter, which can be summarised as ‘paint the mores of Puerto Rico’ for ‘us’ (fellow painters in Paris) and, ultimately, for all those not familiar with the island. Most intriguingly, one could argue that, quietly showing what an artist would or could do (and paint) on what was considered an isolated/isolating, boring, and ‘remote’ Caribbean island, Oller’s body of work offers an indirect response to the questions posed by his friend Guillemet in his 1865 letter, namely, ‘What the hell do you want to do in Puerto Rico?’ and, opening the door to intriguing speculations, ‘What would [and could] Pissarro do in St Thomas?’
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust (Fumagalli’s Research Fellowship RF-2023-232/5), the University of Essex Research Promotion Fund, The Clark Art Institute (Paravisini-Gebert’s Fellowship), and Vassar College, which has kindly awarded a Visiting Scholarship to Fumagalli.
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Soto-CrespoR. (2009), Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press).
SullivanE. J. (2014), From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism (New Haven and London, Yale University Press).
TaylorR. (1983), ‘Introducción/Introduction’, in
BenítezM. & VenegasH. (eds), Francisco Oller: Un realista del Impresionismo/Francisco Oller: A Realist-Impressionist (Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce), 1–24.
VenegasH. (1979), ‘El Velorio: Propuesta para una reintegración’, Plástica, May, 16–21.
VenegasH. (1983), ‘Francisco Oller: Perfil de un pintor puertorriqueño/ Francisco Oller: Profile of a Puerto Rican Painter’, in
BenítezM. & VenegasH. (eds), Francisco Oller: Un realista del Impresionismo/Francisco Oller: A Realist-Impressionist (Ponce, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce), 121–154.
VenegasH. (1985), ‘Oller en Cuba’, Horizontes: Revista de la Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico, 56: 89–93.
de ZequeiraJ. (1894), El Velorio. Cuadro de costumbres puertorriqueñas por F. Oller. Estudio crítico (Puerto Rico, La Cooperativa).
1
Letter from Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Guillemet to Francisco Oller, 12 September 1866, Colección Angelo Paniagua, Papeles de Francisco Oller, included in the original French in Delgado’s biography in Appendix IIa, (Delgado Mercado 1983: 211–12). All quotations from this letter are from Delgado’s book and will be accompanied by the page number for the French original preceded by GO in parentheses in the text. Translations are ours. According to Delgado the letter is dated the 12th, but the text (in Spanish) suggests that it was written on the 4th of September; this does not appear to be true of the French original where also the text refers to the 12th (Delgado Mercado 1983: 37, 212).
2
Letter from Jacob Camille Pissarro to Francisco Oller, 14 December 1865, Colección Angelo Paniagua, Papeles de Francisco Oller, included in the original French in Delgado’s biography in Appendix IIa (Delgado Mercado 1983: 209). All quotations from this letter are from page 209 of Delgado’s book. Translations are ours.
3
We are currently writing a monograph on these painters provisionally entitled Painting the Caribbean 1850–1914. This article is an extract from one of the monograph’s chapters.
4
Dating some of Oller’s works has been a difficult task for art historians, particularly because Oller dated relatively few of them (Taylor 1983: 26). We will follow the dates included in the catalogue compiled by Benítez & Venegas (1983: 155–214), unless otherwise specified.
5
Delgado provides an earlier date for this canvas: 1846–8 (Delgado Mercado 1983: 285).
6
See, for example, Rafael Trelles’s installation Visiting ‘The Wake’ (1991) or Antonio Martorell’s Copia al carbón: Homenaje al velorio (2000) and El Velorio (No Vela) (2010).
7
We found no historical evidence of the ‘cult’ Venegas might be referring to.
8
‘One day he was told of the death of a new baby and invited to the wake. When he arrived he was amazed to find the house full of people, singing, drinking, and eating. The baby had been laid out on a table, surrounded by flowers and, of all the people there, only the mother, seated beside the baby, was crying’ (Boehm-Oller 1967: 27; translation ours).
9
In the preparatory study for El Velorio (c. 1992–3) the brushwork is rather loose, but it seems that the mother is not wearing the white bandana which appears in the final version. The fact that it was added later might suggest Oller’s desire to create a stronger link between mother and Black figure.
10
See, for example, Miguel Luciano, El Orgullo de Plátano/Plátano Pride (2006) and Karlo Andrei Ibarra, Remanentes (2011–15).
11
Asenjo y Arteaga (1968), Las Fiestas de San Juan. Reseña histórica de lo que han sido y de lo que son y relación verídica de las que se celebran en este año de 1868, reproduced in Appendix III in Delgado’s biography (Delgado Mercado 1983: 213–18). References to Asenjo y Arteaga’s commentary will refer to Delgado’s Appendix, with page number in parentheses in the text preceded by AA. Translations are ours.
12
Un boca abajo I and II, Una madre esclava or La recompensa de la nodriza do not appear in the catalogue compiled by Benítez and Venegas but in Delgado’s book, all dated 1866–7 (Delgado Mercado 1983: 48, 50, 304).
13
14
Delgado proposes the earlier date (Delgado Mercado 1983: 51), Benítez and Venegas the later (Benítez & Venegas 1983: 213). Lavandera II is not included in Benítez and Venegas’s catalogue.
15
For more on this see Benjamín Nistal-Moret, Esclavos prófugos y cimarrones Puerto Rico, 1770–1870 (1984).
16
This canvas does not appear in the catalogue compiled by Benítez and Venegas—the dating comes from Delgado (Delgado Mercado 1983: 283).
17
Historia general de las Indias [Monserrat manuscript] ca. 1535–49 MSS HM 177, 46r [bk 7, ch. 8], The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
18
Delgado believes that, despite Oller’s efforts, El Velorio was not actually shown at the Paris Salon of 1895 (Delgado Mercado 1983: 111–12), but this is beside the point we are making here.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a46
Published on: 2 December 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 4
Article view count: 115
Article download count: 9
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Fumagalli, M.C. & Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2025), ‘“What the hell do you want to do in Puerto Rico? What would Pissarro do in St Thomas?”: Francisco Oller and the art of painting the Caribbean’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(4): a46 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a46Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
Older Women Rock! Leah Thorn
In this article artist/activist Leah Thorn shares the processes and rationale underpinning ‘Older Women Rock!’, a project creating pop-up political art spaces to raise awareness and explore issues facing early-old-age women in their 60s and 70s. Through poetry, performance, retro clothes, film, consciousness-raising and listening skills, ‘Older Women Rock!’ celebrates older women, unites them across differences, challenges their invisibility and subverts society’s assumptions and prejudices about them. The project arose out of a 10-month Leverhulme Trust artist residency undertaken by Leah in 2015 at the Kent Academic Primary Care Unit, University of Kent, and the England Centre for Practice Development, Canterbury Christ Church University. The project was developed in 2017 through a Fellowship at Keele University Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
10 August 2023
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